Q & A with Maria Milian, Director of Collage Habana, FCBC
Cuban art is truly acclaimed and valued worldwide, particularly since the 1980s, when a vigorous generation of young artists graduated in arts schools gained momentum in important enclaves for international art in Europe and America.
Cuban institutions targeting the promotion and marketing of Cuban art overseas have developed different strategies to achieve their goals, adapting to the circumstances imposed by the circuits that legitimate and dictate the rules. They presently face new challenges: persevering in the participation in events, exhibiting aesthetically revitalizing proposals, which most of the times break the traditional schemes of museography, “reaching out” potential customers with more perseverance and diversifying them.
AxE News talked yesterday, during the opening ceremony of HB collective exhibition, to Maria Milian, who tackled some of the keys to understand the emergence, present and future of that proposal, conceived as an “aggressive” market strategy in Biennial times.
The project
«The conception process, the project’s genesis, is what has made possible to hold a second edition. Putting together the efforts of marketing entities in terms of discerning a catalogue of authors with conceptual unity is a great challenge.
«Continuing the career we started, the second edition coincides with Havana Biennial because it’s the right time, when this city becomes a showcase for Cuban art. »
«We can’t forget that there is a restriction on domestic market, which stops us from continuously promoting and marketing works in the country. All of it contrasted with a more and more diverse and bold visuality, as well as the new proposals of formal and conceptual values that we are interested in spreading. That’s the reason why we have to ´make the most´ of this visit of collectors, art dealers, and launching this strategy translated into a large-scale exhibition.»
The location… Today Pabexpo, and tomorrow?
«One of the challenges is conceiving a space that actually works as a setting to be likened in visuality and museography to the so-refreshing aesthetic proposals of Cuban art to date. Works and spaces are to be validated. People usually say that the gallery legitimates the work of artists, and the other way around. Creating an exhibition site with the conditions we can presently admired, with this museography system, allows us to validate these pieces.»
Differences with the first edition…
«The change lies in the work we have carried out in, talking to the younger generations, we are even including works created by recently-graduated artists such as Mabel Poblet.»
A constant space for Cuban art market …
«I wouldn’t dare to catch a glimpse of a clear possibility in the future when it comes to a permanent space, just like an exclusive fair on Cuban art, or an international profile. First of all, because such event would take us to consider a potential in situ customer. And there is still a lot of work to do on this matter.
«Today we must put our work on the international map, our Cuban contemporary art. And I believe that in the future we could try to conceive a more ambitious project.»
New market for art in Cuba
«There is still a lot of work to do in order to attract this possible new Cuban customer. The institutional collecting has already been gauged, and it’s also valid. We do want to attract that possible collector, who actually exists, but is still too ingenuous, perhaps too inaccessible.
«The artists also become buyers of their colleagues’ works. There was a time when they only exchanged works, but they have presently moved to the possibility of acquiring works for their collections.»
AxE News will be publishing, on its Youtube page, the video of the HB opening ceremony, on Wednesday May 9, 2012, in the framework of Havana’s 11th Biennial.
